Letters To A Ghost
by MurmursInTheSea
Summary: John knows no one listens. He knows Sherlock is gone, but that doesn't stop him from writing, but none of the letters go anywhere. They sit at the bottom of a box in his bedroom. Companion piece to Palace. Disclaimer: I own none of the characters.
1. Quietness

I know you used to watch me when I slept. I always knew.

.

You thought you were quiet. You thought I would not know, but I didn't survive in Afghanistan for so long by pure chance. I know when people watch me. I have that sense, you know. I knew.

I dreamt you died. I dreamt of the pool, and the semtex, and that the flames howled and burned through everything. I was untouched, and your heart dripped from a hole in your chest. Like the Tin Soldier. Your heart, molten, on the floor. And I couldn't hold it in, I couldn't hold you together. And it tasted like sand and blood and the faint dizziness of burning gasolene.

Do you know what it feels like, not being able to hold you together? When I saw you crumble, disbelieving, broken and disconcerted? Do you? I feel as though I have failed the world. Failed everything.

If no one can save you, then who can? Who can possibly see what I see, what I never saw to begin with, the man you are between the cracks, the soft voice and the soothing touch. The innocent bewilderment when someone doesn't understand why you did something. Why someone would love another human. Why anyone, anyone, would love you.

I woke in the dark and I did not breathe. If I breathed, then it would mean that I continued to live while the Tin Soldier didn't.

.

And then I smelt you, the stale smell of spilt experiments, milk, clothing a few days old and mussy hair. And my shampoo, damned git, can't you find your own shampoo? And the soft pad of bare feet on a cold floor.

You would brave horrors for me.

Why? Why would you? Ordinary, ordinary, ordinary me.

I was never the only one to suffer from dreams. I still do.  
But you watched, silent in the door frame, and I could hear the hesitation. The desire to enter, the need to leave, the resulting limbo.  
And I wondered if it would be right for me to invite you in, ask you to sit by my bed, ask you to lie with me so that I wouldn't have to wake, thinking you were gone. How is that fine? How could that be fine? But I can't explain it. Not now.

I can't wake up and think it's okay. I can't wake up and know that below me, you might not be sleeping. I won't hear you. I won't hear the chaos and I won't hear the music and I won't know that you aren't gone.

Because I still see you burning, and the blood that escapes your head is oil and it reeks when it burns. And your heart can't be kept in your chest.

I try to keep it in for you, but you never let me. You never let me and you die.

And I wake up alone, remembering how you felt when you stood in the door, how it was when I wanted you to be near but didn't ask. And it doesn't make it hurt any less. And it doesn't make it okay.

I still don't know how to feel.

Won't you come back and watch me sleep? Won't you do that, for me?


	2. Lives To Save

You must have deduced enough about my parents from one telephone call with my sister. You were listening. How do I know that? Well, for one, you stopped howling precise observations at the telly. Instead you were just growling 'wrong'.

Look at that. You really did a number on me.

You didn't look at me after I put the phone down, the mechanisms of your mind whirling as you put two and two together. This was a conversation I knew my way around, one I had endured since upper secondary. People didn't like to look into your eyes for a long time. They thought that if they didn't pay attention to the horrors of the world, it would never affect them. They were curious but they were bound by the expected mutter of 'I'm sorry' and 'It will be alright'. Sometimes people were rude, asking why? How? And who do you live with now? As though they can't somehow fathom that we didn't live with anyone, because even with Mum in the house it was as though we had a ghost haunting us instead.

Two ghosts. Two children. And a cold bed with an empty left side.

.

You stayed silent. You nodded at the phone in my hand. 'Your sister wishes to borrow money you have no desire to lend her,' you remarked, frowning slightly. 'I thought you liked sentiment.'

I wasn't expecting that complete avoidance. I liked it, but at the same time I wished you wanted to talk to me. Because after two decades of pity, I wanted something else. Something brittle to break the ice.

But I pressed my lips together, shook my head, and clenched my hand. It wasn't trembling - never trembles when you're around - but it was still a habit. 'It's complicated, Sherlock,' I sighed. 'Relationships are complicated.'

Your lips twitched in a spasm of a smile. 'Precisely why I choose to avoid them,' you returned smoothly. The smug look disappeared for a moment, eyes flickering back and forth on the floor, then up. Sometimes, I don't know what colour your eyes are.

It's very difficult to remember now, too.

'However, you are quite exceptional,' you told me solemnly. 'You are never complicated.'

I took that as an insult then, but it really wasn't, was it? The great Sherlock Holmes loves complicated, intricate puzzles, but when it comes to feelings he would prefer them to be simple. Unbound. Unformed. Easy. Something to quieten the pounding he must hear in his head.

.

It was a tumour in his heart. The doctor had no idea what it was until it was too late. It was so rare, so unexpected, that we had various specialists come in to check. When Dad found out, he just nodded grimly and accepted his fate. He didn't protest, or scream, or even throw anything. That wasn't him. He was never violent, even though he could have been. He played rugby in school, and wanted to go professional, only he tore a ligament in his knee. The doctor suggested surgery to remove the tumour before it was too late.

'It'll be alright, John,' he promised with a smile, already slipping under the drugs. 'I'll be fine.' He told me what we both wanted to hear.

Somehow, only twenty, and Harry was already aware of things much greater than a surgeon's confidence and a wife's fragile hope. She turned her back on the doctors, on Dad, on everything. It was the first night she got drunk, really piss-drunk and head-first in the gutter. That was how she avoided reality. My version of it was getting a membership at the firing range, and learning how to use a gun. Learning about control, steady hands, and how the dead focus meant that I couldn't hear Mum's sobbing.

Mycroft's seen the file, doubtless. He knows my father died in surgery. He knows my mother was admitted to a place where 'she'd feel better'. Harry put her there, when I was in the army.

.

Here's the truth, the bloody awful truth.

I went to medical school to become a doctor, so that I could take matters into my own hands. So that I wouldn't make mistakes, so that if I got through it all, there would be the chance that one less incompetent idiot wasn't holding a scalpel. But as time passed, I couldn't go home, and there was nowhere I could go without running into someone who knew. Someone asked me what I would do next with my career, with all the promise that I showed. There was nowhere further from Harry, from Mum, than Afghanistan. I enrolled myself.

The first time I saved a life, it was a great relief. I had been struggling with Anthony for four hours. His heart stopped twice, but in the end, he surfaced, tear tracks running down his face and a small photograph folded in his front pocket.

The first time I took a life, I found out how easy it was. A single bullet, and an entire history was erased. No hours of struggling. No tears. Just shock, and silence. I shot five more people within the next minute.

And then I shot someone for you. I shot a bad man, a man who would have killed so many other people. He would have killed you. I saved lives yet to be taken, and it was so _easy._ Mycroft was right. You are the battlefield, and now I am lost again, with no quiet place, no heaviness of a gun in my hand. Nothing.

.

No music. No sneers. No burning. No heads in the fridge.

Silence.


	3. A Good Man

'You're a good man. Don't hurt me. Please don't hurt me.'

Was that what he said? I don't remember much of it. Funny, isn't it, how I was so angry I forgot to take in the details. Details are important. You taught me that, in so many discrete methods. Your hand guided me through seas of oblivion, teaching me to be aware of the inconvenient truth.

Rich Brook. I wrote it down afterwards, over the newspapers, circling it over and over and over. I'm guessing you got the joke before I did, but that was always you. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant, bloody brilliant you. A step ahead of everyone. Except Moriarty, in the end, when it mattered most. When the game overtook you and your bloody pride, and ripped a hole in my universe.

Like a Siamese twin without his counterpart. Like veins without arteries. Yin and an absent Yang.

Can you tell I'm drunk? Can you? The blotches will tell you, they will. All of it. Maybe you'll smell the whiskey on the paper.

.

I'm not turning into Harry. That's not it. I just went out with Stamford.

Too many drinks. That's why I thought this was a good idea. Pour my heart out.

You sod. You should have been around when I was drunk. I would have told you a lot of things. Things I can't say when I'm sober and God-fearing and very aware of how poorly constructed our flat is. That Mrs Hudson would hear my string of obscenities. And what comes after.

What always comes after.

You. You. You and you and the blood that streamed out.

Did you know that blood only turns red when the hemoglobin reacts with oxygen? That's how I know you aren't an angel, or an alien, or a demon come to take me away for my sins. Hemoglobin in your blood. Chemical reactions.

You would have liked that.

You would.

.

'I know you're a good man.' That's what it was, that's what Moriarty said.

Very clever, aren't you. You two think you have it all figured out. Your deductions and manipulations and the way you mimic real things, never really knowing. I'm good at hiding. I'm so, so very good.

That's why you never really knew. That, and you're a sod. Sod.  
Obscenities. See?

I'm not a good man. Blood is thick on my hands. I was a doctor, but I shot people of my own accord. I could have been part of the Red Cross. I could have chosen the path of the pacifist, but I'm a protector. Those that protect are not good men. We never are. We have no boundaries, no morals, as long as those that matter are safe. We kill, we conquer, we tear apart the fabric of the universe so that our loves can live. We are the most ruthless.

And, most importantly, when we lose that which we protect, we can only seek revenge.

You're gone, Sherlock. You jumped. I left you when I should have known something was wrong, and I came back too late. I failed.

Revenge.

When Mycroft slips up, when he forgets to close all his fences, I will find Moriarty's web. I will tear it apart. I will make them bleed. I will destroy it.

I will burn the heart out of him.


	4. Forgetting, Remembering

I thought I saw you today.

I moved back into the flat. Some of your papers are still here. I need them.

I don't know why I keep writing. It's not as though you would ever see any of this. But if you were here, I wouldn't have to address my letters, or sign them, or even write the date because you would deduce all of that. And I would tell you that it's brilliant, or use some other derivative of the word. And you would pretend not to be pleased, but I would know that you were smiling.

I can't think about the would-have-beens. I can't do that.

.

The nightmares have changed since then. Things with teeth. Monsters under the bed. I see you flying, with dark wings spread out as though you could catch the rising wind. You're so thin you would have lifted away, spiraling like the snow. The wings tear apart. They're only wax, and they melt into the ground, deep red and dirty brown. Always, always, always, I run to you, but the bullet hits me hard in the shoulder. It bursts into flames and I am burning. I hit the ground the same time you do, only you're covered in blood, and me, in fire.

I know what fire feels like. I know what burning flesh smells like. I can almost taste the thick murk of it on my tongue when I wake up.

I don't remember how your hands feel anymore. We did hold hands, once, running in the dark, cuffed at the wrist. I remember the shape of your wrist, the colour of the leather, but not the weight, not the texture, and not the temperature. You would have catalogued it all down, wouldn't you? Every little detail would be stored away in your mind palace. You'd never forget me.

I don't want to forget you. It's normal. That's what my therapist says. Forgetting is natural. The brain can only store so much information.

What about you? Damnit, Holmes, what about you?

.

It wasn't you, though, because he was in a hoodie, his head was practically shaved, and his shoulders were slouched. He didn't even look at me, except maybe once, since I stared so long I think he might have thought me a stalker.

I'm seeing things, my therapist tells me. Looking for things in the dark that aren't mine to keep. I should let you go. I think she conspires with Donovan. I ran into Donovan in a supermarket, and she just smiled painfully at me, shifting from side to side like she wanted to run.

'Don't you think it's time to move on?' she told me. Those words precisely.

I told her to go fuck herself. I'm not usually so crude, especially not with women. Then again, I never punched an official before I met you.

No one tells you to just move on from the war. No one expects you to recover from it. They think you will have terrible dreams for the rest of your life. They expect you to become alcoholics, violent men, murderers, depressives. They send flowers and cards. And yet no one seems to understand that you're my war. You're death and blood and explosives at three in the morning.

And you're the git that makes bad tea when you think it'll make me forgive you. You play my favourite Christmas carols when you think I'm not listening. You let me splint your fingers after a stupid fight, and you let me drag you out of the Thames when you decide it's a good night for corpse-hunting. You give me date advice that sounds more like jealous banter, and still tell me that I'm a bore after you've deduced the entire mucked-up evening down to the last detail.

You were my universe, Sherlock Holmes.

So I didn't see you in the street, because you're dead, and I'm alone.

I'm alone.


End file.
